This morning I upgraded to Firefox 2.0, though I didn't install the official build There were a number of obstacles to overcome to get everything working the way I wanted it, here is my story...

The first thing I did was make a backup of my entire profile directory, I did this by right clicking on the folder (C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox on most Windows systems) and creating a 7Zip archive of it. This meant that I could try the upgrade multiple times by going back to my previous configuration - the process I arrived at here was the result of three false starts.

Next I uninstalled some extensions I knew I wouldn't need - I'd had TabBrowser extensions installed but disabled for a long time, and I knew Firefox 2.0 came with built in spell checking so I uninstalled Spellbound too. I don't think this was strictly necessary, but I did it anyway.

The first issue I discovered was that there was no version of LiveHTTPHeaders available for Firefox 2.0, though there is a patch for the install.rdf. I found that if I updated the extensions\{8f8fe09b-0bd3-4470-bc1b-8cad42b8203a}\install.rdf file in my profile using this patch before I attempted to run Firefox 2.0 then LiveHTTPHeaders seems to work fine. (This will probably work for other extensions too, but I didn't try it because I didn't need to)

Now I did my install, I used a build from plala.or.jp, this comes as a self extracting executable - I just ran it and directed it to output into my Program Files directory, then set up a shortcut by right clicking on firefox.exe. Double-clicking the shortcut starts the upgrade process.

Next up I got my locale and dictionary stuff sorted - first the British English Language Pack and then the British English Dictionary, no problems there.

Finally, I wanted to get my favourite Pinball Theme installed. I did a load of hacking around to get the beta version working on my release, but in the last few hours the 2.0 version has become available Good job too, the beta version didn't look too good in some places.

So now I'm all updated and happily browsing with Firefox 2.0!